


Daughters-in-Law

by firsttraintovictoriaville



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: French Revolution, Historical Hetalia, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-23
Updated: 2017-06-23
Packaged: 2018-11-18 01:10:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 674
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11280615
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/firsttraintovictoriaville/pseuds/firsttraintovictoriaville
Summary: France watches as his foreign daughter-in-law dies. He also watches himself die. The entire country cheers for the both of them.





	Daughters-in-Law

France isn’t so much as dying but more like he’s peeling off dead skin. His hands hurt when they run against Austria, there are small circles on his palm where he began to peel off the dead skin but the new skin is still too weak, too fragile. He’ll wince occasionally but then Austria, no, it’s Roderich in this moment, will kiss him with such ferocity, the ferocity that could inspire marriage consummations and realize why Spain, no, Antonio, spent two hundred years holding onto him, the pain is gone. At least, skin deep it is. 

The country of love does not fuck in his rebirth. Austria does. Those marriages that garnered that hexameter left a permanent mark inside him. Austria is, at the very least, the world’s greatest spouse. He knows how to please and when France is laying there, trying make his head move from side to side but can’t because it is locked in place, Austria rides and rides off into the sunset. He is fortunate and France wonders if he should have concentrated on living up to his reputation instead of being saddled by it. Austria does not tell him that when he looks in the mirror, that one single strand of hair that everyone loved to curl around their fingers during moments of pleasure, could fall eerily close to a widow’s peak on his forehead. 

France loses his head and Francis watches his King die and he is stuck cheering on the outside while wishing he could have saved Louis’s life-all of their lives-on the inside. He gets his head put back on his body, a scar on his neck but that will soon fade to nothing more than a thin white line, but the others do not. They were good men and good women, they were. Madame Élisabeth prays for him even when she should be praying for herself. He vows that at least her death would not be in vain. 

But before Madame Elisabeth could die, she, had to go. In the centuries that will follow he will not understand how she would be his most famous daughter when she had only been a daughter-in-law. Francis understands, she was beautiful and blonde and so youthful even as she became a woman. He loved her even when he was meant to hate her. When she died, Maria Antonia, Marie Antoinette, Austria weeped for the loss of his emperor’s aunt even when the emperor himself didn’t. France was too busy being engulfed in blood and loss and revolution to notice that beautiful strand of brown hair was limp and falling down in front of his face and Roderich in his mourning clothes, pure white. 

Francis, healthier and more beautiful the scar on his neck settling nicely into a thin white line, sees Roderich again on March 11th 1810, Roderich has the grin of a cat who got his cream. Apparently it was a well deserved cream, Francis had heard that he had been panicky, scared, news of Napoleon wanting a Russian bride sent poor Austria into a near fever. This Roderich was confident and secure, he was doing what he did best. 

Francis comforted the girl who didn’t look to be nervous but he saw the flashes of her fear and anxiety in her eyes. She was a teenager and already being sent away from home and forced to live in a strange land and marry a strange man. 

“Are you sure you want to do this?” he whispered to her as she held on tightly to his arm, her complexion getting paler as the minutes went by. 

“Yes.” She had never looked more Austrian than she did in that moment. It was a one word response but it was the truth, he could tell. This marriage was going to be her duty and she was not going to fail it. 

He was petrified of jinxing it but he could already tell he was going to love his teenage Austrian daughter-in-law Marie and that France would love her too.

**Author's Note:**

> i love Spaustria but I also love Marie Antoinette more than enough to make this. 
> 
> Marie Antoinette was an Austrian teenager who was sent at 15 to get married to Louis XIV. Nowadays we think of Marie Antoinette was the ultimate French queen but in reality part of her downfall was the fact that she was Austrian. 
> 
> Madame Élisabeth was the younger sister of Louis XIV and she is considered a martyr and Servant of God in the Catholic church
> 
> Napoleon really did want a Russian wife but Austria was worried about the two powers it was in between joining together so they sent Marie-Louise who was nineteen years old at the time to marry him. Because of this marriage Napoleon ended up being the great-nephew-in-law of Marie Antoinette and Louis XIV.


End file.
